Monday 7 February 2011 08.32 EST
First published on Monday 7 February 2011 08.32 EST

Madeleine Chalmers of The Abbey School, Reading is the winner of this year's TS Eliot prize for poetry Shadowing Scheme. The scheme, run jointly by the Poetry Book Society and the English and Media Centre's emagazine, gives students the chance to read poems by each of the poets shortlisted for the Eliot prize and to enter a writing competition putting the case for their choice of poet. Madeleine chose Seamus Heaney's collection Human Chain.

A good poet should strike a chord with us, make us exclaim: "Yes, that's it exactly, only I've never thought of it like that." A good poet gets us "a-patter" with feeling and provides a fresh outlook on life. For me, Seamus Heaney does exactly that with "Had I not been awake" and "Human Chain". The first poem details how one isolated incident, a sudden gust of wind, becomes in Heaney's hands an event of immense significance, a milestone forcing the poem's persona to question his life. In "Human Chain", we witness the bonds of fellowship that link us in common humanity, but also the links in the chain of life, death, and renewal, as the burden is passed to the next generations, the continuation of the "chain".

Both poems are rooted in immediate, physical sensations. We feel the excitement as the persona in "Had I not been awake" starts awake, "the whole of me a-patter" and the brute effort in the trudging "stoop and drag and drain" of "Human Chain". The sensory focus of these poems is intensely, but not exclusively, personal. It takes Heaney's deft touch to establish the connection between persona and reader. "Two packed wads of grain I'd worked to lugs" has such earthy immediacy and clarity that we feel the bulge of these "wads" in our own hands. The vividness of his description, which is clothed in such apparent simplicity, makes his poems touching and establishes an emotional "human chain".

The physicality inherent in both poems is transmuted into something much more transcendent. The ordinary becomes extraordinary, and the personal universal in an echo of the human chain from which the collection draws its name. These are poems about the solidarity of the human experience in all its bittersweetness. "Had I not been awake" moves from a thrilling evocation of what it is to be "Alive and ticking" to a melancholy reflection on transience and the fleeting nature of life, which is only "A courier blast".

In these poems, Heaney dexterously balances the elegance of expression and stark emotional truth, distilled and intensified by his poems' deceptive limpidity. The effect is that of a mirror being held up to us. His meaning is not circumscribed, it is only a reflection, an image hinting at the breadth of human experience – Heaney forces us to make our own meaning from his poetry, so that we engage fully, at such a deep level that his poetry can be revisited time and time again. We can read these poems not only with our heads, but with our hearts, and for me that is the hallmark of a true master. Not only are these poems endlessly stimulating intellectually and aesthetically satisfying, they are also approachable, and unpretentious. Heaney's skill and artistry do not manifest themselves in overtly showy tricks but in a beauty and grace which are refreshing and touching. Their intensely human muscularity and delicacy speak directly to me – I feel linked into Heaney's human chain.